Does the D-Link ShareCenter do enough to warrant a prominent position in your home?

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D-Link has designed the ShareCenter NAS device to be at the centre of your home network, sharing your files and media throughout your home and over the internet – an admirable aim.

The installation process is fairly straightforward, though there are a few options that you need to set yourself, and these can be confusing if you're not used to setting up network attached storage devices.

For example, at one point you're asked if you want to enable NTP server, without any explanation of what this is. There's also a step that asks you to enter your email address, along with port number and SMTP server – a pain if you don't have that information readily to hand.

The network drive wasn't mapped during installation – instead we had to run the D-Link Easy Search Utility, which found the D-Link ShareCenter on our network and then let us map it.

As with other aspects of the ShareCenter, the execution was rather cumbersome and inelegant, but it worked. The D-Link ShareCenter isn't the most user friendly of the NAS drives we've tested, but the comparative complexity of the D-Link ShareCenter is the price you pay for some of the better features of this NAS that are absent in some of its competitors.

For example, the D-Link ShareCenter is able to email you with updates about its status, including whether it has reached a temperature that might cause it to become unstable.

File transfer speeds were around 11.6MB/s, which was around average for the NAS devices we tested. Not fantastic, but good enough to copy movies and other media to the device for streaming. Backing up entire hard drives to the device will prove time consuming with those speeds though.

In the end the D-Link ShareCenter does what it says it will, but it seems to be an awkward mix of complicated concepts and features aimed at home users without adequate explanation. A missed opportunity.